


Midnight Land

by inlovewithnight



Series: Bowie Song [1]
Category: Bandom, Empires
Genre: Alternate Universe - Always the Opposite Sex, Gen, cisgirl!Tom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-09
Updated: 2012-04-09
Packaged: 2017-11-03 07:48:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/379036
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inlovewithnight/pseuds/inlovewithnight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It is late and Tom is Sean-sitting.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Midnight Land

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to lalejandra for encouragement.

Tom really wants to be asleep. Her eyes hurt, and her mouth tastes like stale beer and unbrushed teeth, and it's two AM in a hotel room in Missouri and she just really wants to _be asleep_ for a while. A couple hours. Ten or twelve, ideally, but beggars can't be choosers.

Sean can't sleep, though, and if Sean can't sleep, Tom won't either. Sean has been drinking something from a dark, oily-looking bottle since they finished load-out and left the venue. Now he's muttering to himself and scribbling down notes on the pad of hotel paper, tapping out a rhythm against his thigh. Tom recognizes the rhythm as the same one Sean's been playing with for days, trying to get it to match what he hears in his head. Tom thinks it's getting closer. Not that she can hear what Sean hears in his head, but she knows his writing-faces by now. This face is much less frustrated than the other ones.

It's two AM and they're in a hotel room and Max is asleep, so she can't keep her hands busy with her guitar. She picks at the calluses on her palm, instead, scraping away little curls of dead skin with the thumbnail of her other hand. Danielle has lots of nice things to say about Tom's hands, praise and compliments. Tom suspects she might be just a little biased. There's nothing special about them, just skin and tendons and bone that can handle a camera and a guitar pretty well. And Danielle, pretty well. Otherwise, they're mostly useless. Tom's never been able to make things or offer comfort or anything else. As evidenced by the fact that she's sitting here watching Sean try to pin this down instead of doing anything to either help him or get him to stop and go to bed.

"Tom," Sean says, his voice low and urgent. "Tommy." She lifts her eyes and waits, curling her fingers into the cuffs of her sweatshirt. "Listen to this, huh?"

"Max is asleep."

"Oh." Sean's hands, raised to clap, fall back to his lap. "Shit. Let's go outside, then."

"The people in the other rooms are asleep, too."

He frowns, the shadows under his eyes getting deeper as his face crumples. "But I really want you to hear it."

An interviewer for some blog asked her once if her role was to be the nurturer in the band. She had ignored him, of course, because that didn't even make any sense, but right now, she wonders if this is maybe what he meant. "Sleep on it and let us both hear it in the morning." 

He looks around for his dark bottle and she waits, tapping her heels against the floor. She took the bottle and hid it in the trash when he got distracted by getting the refrain written down. She also made a note to herself in her phone to stop letting fans buy him random booze. Brand-name only from now on.

This might be nurturing, too. She'll have to ask Danielle.

"Get some sleep, Sean," she says again, and finally he nods, carefully stacking his papers together and weighting them down with his pen before taking his t-shirt off and sliding into the bed next to Max.

Tom stays curled up in her chair, watching them as Sean's breathing evens out and his hands stop twitching and go still against the sheets. Better. 

The rhythm Sean was tapping out is running loops in her head now, too. She wants to build a guitar line out around it, but with both of them asleep, she definitely can't get her guitar out. She should text Danielle goodnight and put the sheets on the cot so she can go to sleep as well. Tomorrow's going to be a long day of driving back to Chicago.

She picks up her phone and snaps a picture of the bed, leaving Max and Sean's faces out but catching the lines of their bodies, the tangled shadows made by light through the blinds onto crumpled sheets. _goodnight moon_ , she types, and posts the picture to Instagram, where it can wait until Sean gives it its soundtrack in the morning.


End file.
